We’re excited to announce the general public preview of Azure Storage Discovery, a completely managed service that gives you enterprise-wide visibility into your Azure Blob Storage knowledge property.
We’re excited to announce the general public preview of Azure Storage Discovery, a completely managed service that gives you enterprise-wide visibility into your Azure Blob Storage knowledge property. It supplies a single pane of glass to grasp and analyze how your knowledge property has developed over time, optimize prices, improve safety, and drive operational effectivity. Azure Storage Discovery integrates with the Azure Copilot enabling you to make use of pure language to unlock insights and speed up decision-making with out using any question language.
As your group expands its digital footprint within the cloud, managing huge and globally distributed datasets throughout varied enterprise models and workloads turns into more and more difficult. Insights aggregated throughout the whole Azure Blob Storage knowledge property can simplify the detection of outliers, allow long-term pattern evaluation, and assist deep dives into particular assets utilizing filters and pivots. At present, clients depend on disparate instruments and PowerShell scripts to generate, preserve and think about such insights. This requires fixed growth, deployment, and administration of infrastructure at scale. Azure Storage Discovery automates and scales this course of by aggregating insights throughout all of the subscriptions in your Microsoft Entra tenant and delivering them to you straight throughout the Azure portal.
Whether or not you’re a cloud architect, storage administrator, or knowledge governance lead, Azure Storage Discovery helps you rapidly reply key questions on your enterprise knowledge property in Azure Blob Storage:
- How a lot knowledge will we retailer throughout all our storage accounts?
- Which areas are experiencing the best development?
- Can I cut back our prices by discovering knowledge that isn’t being regularly used?
- Are our storage configurations aligned with safety and compliance finest practices?
With Azure Storage Discovery, now you can discover such insights—and lots of extra—with just some clicks and with a Copilot by your facet.
From perception to motion with Azure Storage Discovery
Azure Storage Discovery simplifies the method of uncovering and analyzing insights from 1000’s of storage accounts, remodeling complexity into readability with just some clicks.
A number of the key capabilities are:
Faucet into Azure Copilot to get solutions to probably the most essential storage questions for your enterprise, while not having to study a brand new question language or writing a single line of code. You need to use Copilot to transcend the pre-built stories and produce collectively insights throughout capability, exercise, errors and configurations.
Achieve superior storage insights that provide help to analyze how the info property in Azure Blob Storage is rising, determine alternatives for value optimization, uncover knowledge that’s under-utilized, pinpoint workloads that could possibly be getting throttled and discover methods to strengthen the safety of your storage accounts. These insights are powered by metrics associated to storage capability (object measurement and object depend), exercise on the info property (transactions, ingress, egress), aggregation of transaction errors and detailed configurations for knowledge safety, value optimization and safety.
Interactive stories within the Azure Portal make it easy to research developments over time, drill into prime storage accounts, and immediately navigate to the precise assets represented in every chart. The stories will be filtered to give attention to particular elements of the info property primarily based on Storage account configurations like areas, redundancy, efficiency kind, encryption kind, and others. Group-wide visibility with versatile scoping to assemble insights for a number of enterprise teams or workloads. Analyze as much as 1 million storage accounts unfold throughout completely different subscriptions, useful resource teams and areas inside a single workspace. The flexibility to drill down and filter knowledge lets you rapidly get hold of actionable insights for optimizing your knowledge property.
Totally managed service out there proper within the Azure Portal, with no extra infrastructure deployment or affect on business-critical workloads.
As much as 30 days of historic knowledge will mechanically be added inside hours of deploying Azure Storage Discovery and all insights will likely be retained for as much as 18 months.
Buyer tales
A number of clients have already began exploring Azure Storage Discovery in the course of the preview to research their enterprise Azure Blob Storage knowledge property. Listed here are just a few clients who discovered fast worth in the course of the preview.
Getting a 360-degree view of the info property in Azure Blob Storage
Tesco, one of many world’s largest and most modern retailers, has been leveraging Storage Discovery in preview to achieve an “easy 360 View” of its knowledge property in Azure Blob Storage. To spice up agility in growth, the cloud deployment at Tesco is operated in a extremely democratized method, giving departments and groups autonomy over their subscriptions and storage accounts. Nevertheless, to handle their cloud spend, guarantee their deployment is configured accurately and optimize their knowledge property, every crew is on the lookout for detailed insights in a well timed method. The Cloud Platform Engineering (CPE) crew works with every crew offering them centralized knowledge for value evaluation, safety, and operational reporting. At present, gathering and reporting on these insights to every crew is a extremely handbook and operationally difficult job. As early adopters they’ve been utilizing Azure Storage Discovery to supply a centralized, tenant-wide dashboard—to allow a “single-pane-of-glass” for key metrics and baselines. This helps them cut back the assets and time related to answering easy questions reminiscent of “how a lot knowledge do now we have, and the place?” or “what’s our baseline developments?”
As our knowledge property in Azure Storage continues to develop, it has grow to be time consuming to assemble the insights required to drive selections round ‘How’ and ‘What’ we do—particularly on the tempo which is commonly demanded by stakeholders. In the present day, quite a lot of that is accomplished utilizing PowerShell scripts which even with parallelism, take a big time to run, as a consequence of our general scale. Something which reduces the time it takes me to assemble useful insights is tremendous useful. On the opposite facet, if I have been to place my Ops hat on, the info introduced is compelling for conversations with utility groups; permitting us to give attention to what actually issues and addressing our prime shoppers, versus being ‘snowed in’ underneath a mountain of knowledge.
—Rhyan Waine, Lead Engineer, Cloud Platform Engineering, Tesco
Handle finances by figuring out Storage Accounts which might be rising quickly
Willis Towers Watson (WTW) is on the forefront of utilizing generative AI to boost their providing for Human Assets and Insurance coverage companies whereas additionally balancing their prices. With Azure Storage Discovery, the crew was in a position to rapidly determine storage accounts the place knowledge was rising quickly and growing prices. With the information of which storage accounts to give attention to, they have been in a position to determine utilization patterns, roll out optimizations and management their prices.
As quickly as my crew began utilizing Storage Discovery, they have been instantly impressed by the insights it offered. Their response was, ‘Nice—let’s dive in and see what we are able to uncover.’ In a short time, they recognized a number of storage accounts that have been rising at an uncommon price. With that visibility, we have been in a position to zero in on these Storage Accounts. We additionally found knowledge that hadn’t been accessed in a very long time, so we applied computerized cleanups utilizing Blob Lifecycle Administration to effectively handle and delete unused knowledge.
—Darren Gipson, Lead DevOps Engineer, Willis Towers Watson
How Storage Discovery works
To get began with Azure Storage Discovery, observe these two easy steps: first, configure a Discovery workspace which accommodates the definition of the useful resource, after which outline the Scopes that characterize your enterprise teams or workloads. As soon as these steps are accomplished, Azure Storage Discovery will begin aggregating the related insights and make them out there to you in detailed dashboards that may be discovered within the Studies web page.
Deploying a Discovery workspace allows you to choose which a part of your knowledge property in Azure Blob Storage you need to analyze. You are able to do this by deciding on all of the subscriptions and useful resource teams of curiosity inside your Microsoft Entra tenant. Upon profitable verification of your entry credentials, Azure Storage Discovery will advance to the subsequent step.
As soon as the workspace is configured, you’ll be able to create as much as 5 scopes, every representing a enterprise group, a workload, or another logical grouping of storage accounts that has enterprise worth to you. This filtering will be accomplished by deciding on ARM useful resource tags that have been beforehand utilized to your storage accounts.
After the deployment is profitable, Azure Storage Discovery supplies stories proper throughout the Azure portal with no extra setup.
Pricing and availability
Storage Discovery is accessible in choose Azure areas throughout public preview. The service affords a Free pricing plan with insights associated to capability and configurations retained for as much as 15 days and a Normal pricing plan that additionally contains superior insights associated to exercise, errors and safety configurations retained for as much as 18 months to research annual developments and cycles in your enterprise workloads. Pricing relies on the variety of storage accounts and objects analyzed, with tiered charges to assist all sizes of knowledge estates in Azure Blob Storage.
The Free and Normal pricing plans will likely be provided totally free, with no extra value till September 30th, 2025. Be taught extra about pricing within the Azure Storage Discovery documentation.
Get began with Azure Storage Discovery
You will get began utilizing Azure Storage Discovery to unlock the total potential of your storage inside minutes. We invite you to preview Azure Storage Discovery for knowledge administration of your object storage. To get began, check with the fast begin information to configure your first workspace. To study extra, take a look at the documentation.
We’d love to listen to your suggestions. What insights are most dear to you? What would make Storage Discovery extra compelling for your enterprise? Tell us at StorageDiscoveryFeedback@service.microsoft.com.
